Changing With Change at Hanaan's Diner

We were sitting around yesterday at Hanaan's Diner, which we sometimes call the Grizzly-Que, short for Grizzly barbecue, and the "grizzly" not referring to bear meat, but to Hanaan herself. Of course, we never say it anyplace where she might hear us. She carries a largish bit of cutlery around in her role as fry-cook and owner. She reminds me of Al Hajjaj, the schoolteacher from Taif, who back in the day was sent to straighten out the rebellious city of Al Kufah in Iraq. "I see blood between the turbans and the beards" as he said to a mutinous lot of sons of the desert, who immediately checked in the indicated area to see whether their necks were all in one piece!
We have no turbans nor beards, but Hajjaj salted his speeches with expressions like "You sons of whores!" and I think I have heard Hanaan mutter something close to that when our group saunters in.

Our group is the TYBALTs, The Young Bucks At Lunch Together, and we usually square off against our nemeses, the ROMEOs, Retired Old Men Eating Out. When the hands of the clock in the Palazzo Vecchio are on the prick of noon, these toughs come round rumbling. Stomachs rumbling, that is. They pick the best seats in the house, push extra chairs together, grab all the complimentary local Picayune & Bugle news sheets to see who won the high school basketball game, and generally gab more than they eat.

Today was Coney Dog Day, hot dogs a buck apiece, and we came in. Most chefs would like to see large groups descend upon their eateries at lunch time, particularly people that like coney dogs. However, when you have about 20 geezers come in, and when the wait-staff asks what they want to eat, they all reply one by one, "Honey, I like coney dogs, but them coney dogs don't like me!" and the rest of them titter like its the first time they heard that gastronomic witticism, it gets old extremely fast.

Hanaan acted as if Colonel Gaddafi walked in. Hanaan is Syrian, and for some reason she hates Gaddafi. She has been known to point at particularly large and somewhat ugly onions on her cutting board,  grimace and state aloud "Basal qabiih! Gaddafi!" Loosely translated, it means "Wretched Onion! Gaddafi!" and she follows with a flurry of sharpened edges giving that ugly onion what for.
I tried my ما احلى on her, but "How sweet it is!" did not bring a smile to her face. No one remembers Jackie Gleason anymore; that was his line, "How sweet it is!". Oh, and "Away we go!"  She did not smile, and gave us the willies. I mean, what if there is such a thing as an "honor killing" somewhere in Syria for restaurant customers one despises, and that was the town that Hanaan was the quondam scourge of? We thought it best to tread softly and order some coney dogs.

The ROMEOs split from the TYBALTs, sitting on separate sides of the diner, not so much because we did  not like each other - although that does have some merit - but to keep Hanaan's attention split. We figured that one group would have a clean get-away, at least. I mean, it is a  bit dopey to tell people that your biggest accomplishment of the day was to emerge unscathed from a diner.

Long story short, I have mentioned before that this a a rather diverse area. The Hindu temple is just a mile away. When they put on their big addition, we were hoping for some vividly colored pictures of Ganesh, but no such luck. The mosque - three, actually - are two to five miles away in various directions. Churches bloody well abound. I mean, we have Romanian Reformed Ortodox Korean-Rite churches nearby!
A lot of Macedonians are down a nearby cul-de-sac, and another mosque has just opened down the street from there. However, it is an Ahmadiyya mosque, and some of our buddies that are Sunni  as well as our auto mechanics are really upset about it.
Ethnicity is a learning process.